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Digg's v4 launch: an optimism born of necessity (2018)

lethain.com

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Re: Digg's v4 launch: an optimism born of necessity (2018)

#31

Post by esprehn »

neom wrote: post #22
mr90210 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hasn’t Facebook moved away from LAMP because of… scale? Given how many users they have I suppose they know a thing or two about scale.

Facebook made Cassandra specifically because of this. https://www.cs.cornell.edu/projects/ladis2009/papers/lakshma...

Later Facebook stopped using Cassandra though, and continues to use MySQL.

Re: Digg's v4 launch: an optimism born of necessity (2018)

#32

Post by dmazin »

esprehn wrote: post #31
neom wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook made Cassandra specifically because of this. https://www.cs.cornell.edu/projects/ladis2009/papers/lakshma...

Later Facebook stopped using Cassandra though, and continues to use MySQL.

MySQL backed, in turn, by a log structured storage engine (RocksDB). But the they reason they do that is storage space efficiency rather than availability or performance.

Re: Digg's v4 launch: an optimism born of necessity (2018)

#33

Post by broknbottle »

conradfr wrote: post #21
deergomoo wrote: post #18

Good read. Interesting that the author’s takeaway is that folks consider Digg v4 to be a catastrophic launch because of the myriad technical issues. I don’t even remember there being technical issues, I just remember logging in one day to find a website I enjoyed replaced with a bunch of crap I wasn’t interested in.

That's my recollection of it. Just one day the content was not interesting anymore and felt certainly more gamed than before, which they wanted to combat as per this blog post. I'm surprised the conclusion is not that they learn to never do a full rewrite of a social product again.

This so much. I remember visiting digg after v4 launch and it felt like a totally different site. At the time I remember looking for site that filled void and offered similar content but wasn’t so focused e.g. slashdot and I came upon reddit

Re: Digg's v4 launch: an optimism born of necessity (2018)

#34

Post by yalogin »

I was really hoping there would be an analysis of why the v4 was needed from a revenue point of view. The v4 essentially winked the company because no one likes the UX/UI. Digg insisted on it. Interestingly years later, Reddit followed the same route. They moved to the exact same UI that I hated with digg. Luckily they kept the older UI which is what kept me with the site. I am yet to get an answer about why the redesign was necessary and what it would give them they couldn’t get with the old design

Re: Digg's v4 launch: an optimism born of necessity (2018)

#35

Post by jayknight »

captainmuon wrote: post #30
tyingq wrote: post #29

A year or two prior to this, they were also putting linked sites into iframes, with the "digg bar" on top. So they had managed to alienate not just their users, but also the site owners that all the content linked to.

That can actually be quite useful, if implemented correctly. Even as a site owner I wouldn't mind, because it lets users upvote my content after reading it easily. But evolving browser standards killed it and most of the time it was implemented annoyingly. Actually it would be nice if this was a browser feature. Click on a link on a site like HN or Reddit, browse to the new page as usual, but you have a little incons…

There was a reddit toolbar browser extension at one point that did this. If you clicked a link in reddit, you'd get a bar with title, score, comment count, and voting buttons. It was integral to my reddit experience until it stopped working and afaik never worked again.

Re: Digg's v4 launch: an optimism born of necessity (2018)

#36

Post by esprehn »

EdwardDiego wrote: post #7

Waiters? ...really?

That is/was tech culture, but also the cost of catering an event like this is not that high. Maybe a couple thousand dollars to boost morale? It probably cost the same as a couple of MacBooks or office chairs and those are consolidated costs to individual employees. The catering is divided by everyone.

Re: Digg's v4 launch: an optimism born of necessity (2018)

#37

Post by Seanambers »

deergomoo wrote: post #18

Good read. Interesting that the author’s takeaway is that folks consider Digg v4 to be a catastrophic launch because of the myriad technical issues. I don’t even remember there being technical issues, I just remember logging in one day to find a website I enjoyed replaced with a bunch of crap I wasn’t interested in.

Yeah, the technical issues weren't that crazy from the user perspective. The change of features were though. It was a totally different site, people left because the core functionality of the site disappeared over night.

Edit - makes me wonder if they used the site themselves.

Re: Digg's v4 launch: an optimism born of necessity (2018)

#38

Post by swalsh »

deergomoo wrote: post #18

Good read. Interesting that the author’s takeaway is that folks consider Digg v4 to be a catastrophic launch because of the myriad technical issues. I don’t even remember there being technical issues, I just remember logging in one day to find a website I enjoyed replaced with a bunch of crap I wasn’t interested in.

Was it the V4 rollout where basically every link came from MrBabyMan?

Re: Digg's v4 launch: an optimism born of necessity (2018)

#39

Post by swalsh »

nunobrito wrote: post #16

Albeit unpopular opinion, this kind of things is one of the reasons why I'll always push for Java instead of a jigsaw of different languages that sound cool. Stability, scalability and simplicity. Yes, you read correctly. Whomever complains that Java is bloated or complex, needs only to look on who is writing that "piece" of code. Expert developers will write proper code that anyone can maintain and keep simple. Too…

Reddit, the clear winner of Diggs traffic was written in python. Guess Python might work just fine :\

Re: Digg's v4 launch: an optimism born of necessity (2018)

#40

Post by tazjin »

nunobrito wrote: post #16

Albeit unpopular opinion, this kind of things is one of the reasons why I'll always push for Java instead of a jigsaw of different languages that sound cool. Stability, scalability and simplicity. Yes, you read correctly. Whomever complains that Java is bloated or complex, needs only to look on who is writing that "piece" of code. Expert developers will write proper code that anyone can maintain and keep simple. Too…

Java itself is pretty good if you stay away from any popular Java library.
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